Journal

Thank you all for taking part in the Humble Bundle, or just for putting up with me blogging, tweeting and facebooking about it. It's been over for a couple of days now: We just got a letter from the guys at Humble letting us know it was:

#1 on the Humble Book Tab
#1 Highest Overall Average for any Bundle.
#1 Media Coverage for a Book Bundle

And they went on to say:

This bundle was particularly special since it elicited such a beautiful and positive reaction from both our fans and Humble newbies alike. I talked with our Customer Service Manager yesterday and he reported that there wasn't a single negative comment. (Except new customers not understanding how to redeem their bundles. A very common complaint.) This has never happened before either!There was a tremendous amount of delighted energy at Humble HQ since the launch. Everyone here was stoked to be involved. Dare I say that it was almost in the realm of The Magical.

I was so happy how many friends, acquaintances and people I do not even know gave it a push.

Here are the final results for your interest:Humble Book Bundle: Neil Gaiman Raritieshttps://www.humblebundle.com/books?view=pPpiWRbzesK-Launch Date: September 9th 2015End Date: September 23rd 2015Avg. price per bundle: $19.6332,294 bundles purchasedTotal Revenue: $633,787.98(Note the numbers might change ever so slightly over the next few weeks.)

I'll post the actual numbers here, and how much money that actually makes and how much is going where, when I get the information from Humble. Hurrah for transparency.

The Moth put up a new radio show and weirdly, in a week a son is born, it includes me talking about my father and my son: http://themoth.org/posts/episodes/1520 (This was actually recorded somewhere on the Unchained Bus Tour of 2012.)

Miracleman, The Golden Age stories by me and Mark Buckingham is coming out right now on a weekly schedule. You really want to go to a comic shop and buy it. It's thrilling for me rereading it now, and really strange starting the process with Mark Buckingham of finishing the story we began so many years ago.

...

The baby is nine days old, happy and healthy and, slightly to my surprise, he makes amazing noises: squeaks like mice and gentle burbling like mourning doves and little chirrupping grunts like guinea pigs. I adore him. And his mother's doing really well too. In case you were wondering.

He was born at 8:37 in the morning on September the 16th, which is, I am told, the commonest birthday in the US. It was a long but rewarding labour. The name on his birth registration is Anthony, but mostly I call him Squeaker. He makes the best noises in the world, mostly squeaks and peeps and snuffles.

Amanda is an amazing mother. I am changing nappies (or diapers, if you are not English) and enjoying it much too much. This is wonderful.

It's broken all the previous Humble Bundle records for Books. As I type this, about 7000 people have already bought the Bundle. It's raised $133,000. And it's done something really peculiar...

The average donation (right now $18.88) is actually higher than the level we had set as our top level ($15). This means that the books we thought were going to be mid-level books are actually, much to our surprise, the top level books.

This means a few things, including some changes of plans in the week ahead to make sure that as many people as possible get as much stuff as possible...

One of the best unexpected side-effects of this has been an ask me anything on Reddit with my daughters, Holly and Maddy Gaiman. You get a great sense of their personalities. They are both very funny in very different ways. For anyone wondering, this is what they look like now.

Maddy is the author of this book. Or she was, in 2002. It's letters and poems we sent each other while I was off writing American Gods, and she was Very Young. Only 100 copies were published, and given to close friends. And now it's part of the Humble Bundle too...

So thank you, and thank you again.

If you haven't bought it yet, you can still get your rare and collectible eBooks, eComics and eWhatnots at https://www.humblebundle.com/books for the next 13 days and 14 hours. 1249 pages of stuff. All the money goes to good causes, and you can control how much of it goes to charities, to the creators, to Humble Bundle...

(There will be more stuff in the bundle released midweek. If you've already bought the bundle you will get it all without having to pay any more.)

...

Also, things I should mention:

Miracleman #1 is out! The art by Mark Buckingham has never looked better. The story by me is, well, I'm still proud of it, after all these years. If you've wondered what the fuss was about, it's a great place to start and should be at your local comic shop.

The Global Goals: On the 25th of September, the UN will officially adopt the new Global Goals. Head over to http://www.globalgoals.org and learn what they are, and what you can do to change the world for the better...

The thing about
having a writing career that spans more than thirty years is that
that you write things – books, comics, all sorts of things – that
for one reason or another become rare. They go out of print. Often
because you are embarrassed by them, or do not want to see them in
print. Or because circumstances are against you. Or because something
was only ever published in a limited edition.

I have a basement
library filled with mysterious copies of things. Some I only have one
copy of. One book, the hardback of my Duran Duran biography, I paid
$800 for, about eight years ago, astonished that anyone would ask
that much, but aware that I'd only ever seen one other copy. (I saw
another one for sale last week for over $4000.)

Many years ago, I
sued a publisher for non-payment of royalties, registering
copyright in his own name on things I'd written, and various other
things. And, because it felt right, I decided that any money
I made from the case would go to charity. Long after the case was
won, when the finances were eventually settled, I found myself with a large chunk
of money. I didn't want to give it all to one charity, and instead formed the Gaiman Foundation which has,
for several years, been using that money to Do Good Things. The Gaiman Foundation has funded the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund's Education program,
various Freedom of Speech initiatives, the Moth's High School program
which teaches kids the power of telling their own stories, along with
helping to fund good causes like the Lava Mae charity, which gives
showers and cleaning facilities to the homeless around San Francisco.

Giving money away to
good causes has been a fine thing to do, especially when the results
were immediate and obvious.

The only downside is
that the initial chunk of money from the lawsuit is almost used up. I've been putting
money into it as well, but last year Holly Gaiman (who is not only my
daughter and an ace hat maker, but is studying running non-profit
organisations and has been invaluable on the professional side of
things of the Foundation) pointed out to me that if the Gaiman
Foundation was to continue, it would need me to put in a big chunk of money as an
endowment. And I started thinking...

Some years ago I
took part in one of the earliest book-based Humble Bundles, and was
really impressed with how the Humble Bundle thing worked. E-books (back then, of out of print or unavailable work,) would be put up DRM free: some of them would be available to anyone who paid anything at all, some only for those who paid above the average, some available to anyone who paid more than a specific amount. Artists and writers got paid,
and money also went to support good causes -- when you paid for your books, you could choose how much of the money going to charity went to which charity, how much goes to the creators, how much to Humble Bundle.

Books that were long
out of print, stories and such that collectors would pay hundreds of
dollars for, obscure and uncollected comics and pamphlets and
magazine articles. Even the things I am still vaguely embarrassed by (like
the Duran Duran biography, a hardcover copy of which, as I said, can set
you back thousands of dollars these days, if you can find one).

Books which
have been out of print for 30 years, like GHASTLY BEYOND BELIEF,
a collection of quotations from the strangest SF and Fantasy books and
movies that Kim Newman and I made when we were 23 and 24
respectively. Things that were absolutely private and never before
sold, like LOVE FISHIE, a book of poems and letters from my
daughter Maddy (aged 8) to me, and from me back to Maddy, that was
made into a book (with help from my assistant the Fabulous Lorraine) as a gift for my 42nd birthday.

Two long
out-of-print books from Knockabout Comics: OUTRAGEOUS TALES FROM
THE OLD TESTAMENT and SEVEN DEADLY SINS, with stories written and or drawn by
me, Alan Moore, Hunt Emerson, Dave Gibbons, Dave McKean and a host of others.

Rare out-of-print comics stories by me and Bryan Talbot, by me and Mark
Buckingham, even by me and Bryan Talbot and Mark Buckingham.

There would be small-press short
story & suchlike collections like ANGELS AND VISITATIONS and the LITTLE
GOLD BOOK OF GHASTLY STUFF containing stories that went on to win
awards and be collected in the more big, official collections (Smoke and Mirrors, etc), and stories no-one has seen since, not to mention non-fiction
articles, like the one about the effects of alcohol on a writer, or
the one where I stayed out for 24 hours on the streets of Soho, that
are now only whispered in rumours.

There would even be
a short story of mine, “Manuscript Found in a Milk Bottle”,
published in 1985, that is so bad I've never let it be reprinted. Not
even to give young writers hope that if I was that awful once, there
is hope for all of them.

Charles from the CBLDF liked the
idea.

It was a good thing
Charles liked the idea. He had to do so much of the work,
coordinating, finding, talking to people, getting contracts with artists and publishers and everyone signed,
all that. Which he did, cheerfully and helpfully and uncomplainingly.

The Humble Bundle people liked the idea too.

Humble Bundle money
is divided between the creators and the charities, with the person buying the
Humble Bundle deciding how the percentage that goes to the charities is divided.

I'm giving my entire portion of Humble Bundle creator-money directly back to the Gaiman
Foundation. (My agent Merrilee has donated her fee, too, so
100% of what comes in to me goes to the Foundation.)

There are,
obviously, other authors and artists and publishers involved. Some
have asked for their money to go to charities, and some are,
perfectly sensibly, paying the rent and buying food with it.

(Originally, we'd
hoped to split the charity money between the CBLDF and the Gaiman
Foundation as well, but in the very last couple of days of putting
things together we discovered that was impractical, so we made the other charity
the Moth's Educational Program instead: it's the Moth storytelling
in High Schools, it's done some really good things, and I'm proud to
be helping it.)

Normally Humble
Bundle likes to explain that you are paying what you like for perhaps
$100 worth of games or books or comics. It's hard to price this stuff –
buying Duran Duran and Ghastly Beyond Belief together
could set you back thousands of dollars. Here, you'll get some ebooks if you pay what
you like, more ebooks if you pay over the average, and some choice
plums (like Duran Duran, and “Manuscript Found in a Milk
Bottle”) if you pay over $15.

There's a total of about 1,300
pages of DRM-free ebooks and comics, fiction and non fiction. There's
even a Babylon 5 Script I wrote.

These books and
comics and suchlike are going to be available during the two week
on-sale life of the Humble Bundle. After that, they are going away
again. This really is your chance to read them.

And remember, it's pay what you want. (If you want to pay the thousands of dollars it would have cost you to buy all this stuff as collectibles, you can do that too. I'll be grateful, and so will the various charities, not to mention the artists, other writers and so on.)

Thank you to Charles
Brownstein; to Mary Edgeberg, Holly Gaiman, Cat Mihos, and Christine
DiCrocco, on my team; thank you to my agent Merrilee Heifetz; to
everyone who drew or wrote or published or in other way gave us
permission to put things up; to Mike Maher and the team at Scribe for mastering the eBooks; and above all thank you to everyone at
Humble Bundle for relentlessly doing good for wonderful causes.

I hope you enjoy all 1,289 rare and collectible pages. Even “Manuscript Found In a Milk
Bottle”.

It's very safe here: we're in Tennessee, in a perfect little house we are borrowing from a midwife who has gone out west to her son's wedding. We are cooking, eating, catching up on our sleep. Amanda's due in a week and her Nesting Instinct seems to be manifesting chiefly in trying to clean out her email inbox. She's also cleaning, washing and folding baby clothes and clean towels. I'm writing a lot, enjoying the lack of cell-phone connection, and the lack of internet connection, and getting things written without distraction. (I wrapped the first draft of a script on Thursday, wrote a preface to SANDMAN:OVERTURE on Friday.) We've felt like a couple for a long time. We're starting to feel like a family.

And the safety feels very fragile, and like something to be treasured.

There's a photo I'm not going to post. You've probably seen it already: it shows Aylan Kurdi, a three year old Syrian refugee, dead on a beach in Turkey after his family tried to get to Greece. It made me cry, but I know I'm overly sensitive to bad things happening to small children right now. I'm reacting as if he's family.

In May of last year I was in a refugee camp in Jordan. I was talking to a 26 year old woman who had miscarried her babies in Syria when the bombs started falling. She had made it out of Syria, but her husband had left her for another woman he hoped would give him babies. We spoke to women eight months' pregnant who had just walked through the desert for days, past the dead and dismembered bodies of people fleeing the war, like themselves, who had been betrayed by the smugglers who had promised them a way to freedom.

I gained a new appreciation for the civilisation I usually take for granted. The idea that you could wake in the morning to a world in which nobody was trying to hurt you or kill you, in which there would be food for your children and a safe place for your baby to be born became something unusual.

The only ones who benefit from the lack of a common European response are the smugglers and traffickers who are making profit from people's desperation to reach safety. More effective international cooperation is required to crack down on smugglers, including those operating inside the EU, but in ways that allow for the victims to be protected. But none of these efforts will be effective without opening up more opportunities for people to come legally to Europe and find safety upon arrival. Thousands of refugee parents are risking the lives of their children on unsafe smuggling boats primarily because they have no other choice.

The UN Refugees Agency wrote about words, and how they matter. In this case, the word migrants and refugees: they don't mean the same thing, and have very different meanings in terms of what a government's obligations are to them. http://www.unhcr.org/55df0e556.html

One of the most fundamental principles laid down in international law is that refugees should not be expelled or returned to situations where their life and freedom would be under threat...

Politics has a way of intervening in such debates. Conflating refugees and migrants can have serious consequences for the lives and safety of refugees. Blurring the two terms takes attention away from the specific legal protections refugees require. It can undermine public support for refugees and the institution of asylum at a time when more refugees need such protection than ever before. We need to treat all human beings with respect and dignity. We need to ensure that the human rights of migrants are respected. At the same time, we also need to provide an appropriate legal response for refugees, because of their particular predicament.

It's worth making sure that people are using the right words. A lot of the time they don't realise there's a difference between the two things, or that refugees have real rights -- the rights you would want, if you were forced to leave home.

A lot of people have been asking me about ways that we as individuals can change things for the better for refugees: there's an excellent article in the Independent about practical things you can do to help or make a difference.

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is feeding and housing and housing and helping literally millions of refugees around the world, always with the eventual goal of getting them safely home one day. Their funding comes from governments and private individuals all over the world. But this crisis has stretched them thin. You can help.

Help children travelling alone by providing specialist support and care.

As I said on this blog when I came back from visiting the camps:

I came away from
Jordan ashamed to be part of a race that treats its members so very
badly, and simultaneously proud to be part of the same human race as
it does its best to help the people who are hurt, who need refuge,
safety and dignity. We are all part of a huge family, the family of
humanity, and we look after our family.

(I'd love it you would spread this post around, and spread the links inside it. People who know that I'm involved in Refugee issues have been asking me about places to donate and what to do and what to read, so I put this together for them, and now, for you. http://rfg.ee/RN3uy​ was the donation link.)